Click here

After a number of years of being on the Net and writing links that baldly said, Click here, I was told a couple of years ago by the Communications Officer of our organisation that this usage was now terribly out-of-date, so 1980s, and shouldn't be used.

So I began to find alternatives to 'Click here,' or just added the link to a particular word in the content.

But I miss 'Click here'. It had a kind of authority about it, an essence of command, a kind of assurance that if you did click here you'd find something worth looking at. Adding links to random words, as is the norm these days all over the Net, tends to make me ignore the links...unless I'm really, really interested in going somewhere different.

Click here said: this is a vital part of the post, and you should read it. A link added to a word within the post just says: take it or leave it, I don't care.

Linkless in some things

I’ve mentioned linkandblogchallenge.com before on this blog, and still find it an interesting way to increase links to my blogs, and to add links to other people’s.

There are two ways of using the site: you can either challenge another member to use a particular word or phrase in a post, and then you link to their post and they link to yours.

Or (if you weren’t confused by the above) you can set up a topic, and other people can link to that via posts on the same topic, on their blogs.

Yeah, I know I’m not explaining it well.

Suffice to say, I go back to this site often to check what’s happening, and run down the list of topics that are up for linking to. It’s surprising what’s there: lots of celebrity stuff, but virtually nothing in the religion area; a good deal on health, but not much on books and writing. Plenty on blogging (which is probably not surprising) but not much on automobiles trains and planes.

I guess I’m expecting the range of topics to be more widespread. Perhaps it depends on who writes on the site, and who doesn’t. I’ll have to add something else to the religion section, because it’s sad to see just one little post listed in there – especially since it’s mine!

Need more input!

I love sites that are full of information. There’s nothing more interesting than digging around a site that has articles, links to articles, and links to the links. So I came at a site advertising ‘no exam life insurance’ with some enthusiasm, because it seemed to have links to all sorts of info. Being 62 this year, I’m having to think about these sorts of things, although at present the life insurance I’ve got ought to see me through. (And we’ve taken out travel insurance for our six months away: if something happened, the other person could wind up being a millionaire! Scary.)
However, the site’s links must be playing up. There are three articles on their Long Term Care page that just keep bringing you back to the same place, and the links to the e-books, in the right-hand column, do the same. Maybe the site’s having a bit of a sickie itself!
When this sort of thing happens on a site, I always start to think: maybe I’ve missed something; maybe I have to sign up or something before it’ll function. I’ve found that before. But it doesn’t seem to be the case here. Pity, because I wouldn’t have minded looking at some of the articles, particularly the one on annuities. Though there seems to be a word missing in the title: Annuities why are the new choice for safe investments for baby boomers...
Somebody must have been having a bad hair day.

Too well known on the Net?

No doubt, like me, you’ve sometimes put your name in the Google box to see what results come up. Mike Crowl is a fairly common name, as it happens, and there are quite a few of them in the States, and thus quite a few results. (I’m the only one in the whole of New Zealand, however - in fact, until my children grew up, we were the only Crowls in any telephone book in the country.)
But I found I get even more results when I put in my username. It turns up everywhere. That’s a bit scary. There is another ‘mcrowl,’ who’s known to the Discuss Cooking forum. And the same one, or another, is a member of the Spring Sonlight Curriculum User group. Spring, as it turns out, isn’t the name of the season, but a place in the States. And Sonlight Curriculum, as you might guess, is a Christian homeschooling syllabus.
Meanwhile, this mcrowl’s life reels before his eyes: Trade Me, Blogit, myLot, Zillion, Link and Blog Challenge, Netscape, Digg, Widgetbox, Epinions, the chess games of Arthur Frank Crowl (my dad). Gold Age Forum, reviews, free videos on the Internet – in Spanish (nah, that can’t be me). My first ever email address still shows up. It’s In My Way forum (a recycling site) to which I've contributed almost nothing. Even eBay, where my reviews from Epinions are used without any permission whatsoever. (As no doubt many other reviewers’ words are.) I’m ubiquitous!

Looking at Linking

One of the biggest ‘concerns’ I guess you might call it, of bloggers, is that of getting anyone to come to your blog. I look at hundreds of other blogs with some degree of envy because they obviously have heaps of people reading their words of wisdom. I don’t think there are heaps of people reading mine, although it appears there must be some. (My Adsense records seem to indicate that there are more readers than just me attending to the blog.)

With this in mind I was interested to come across a very good article on how to build back links on the NetResults.com site. I’m still absorbing it at this stage, but it looks at both the things not to do, and the things you can do. It’s quite comprehensive and I don’t need to quote it at length here (you can find a link in the first sentence of this paragraph). Tomorrow, or as soon as I get some more time, I’m going to go through it with a fine tooth comb and see if I improve my standing within the World of Blog, because my random jottings definitely need to be read by more than a few accidental tourists.

Good old Google!

In the last few weeks I’ve been reading a library book on Google and its search engine, and the way it functions. It was quite an eye-opener. (I’ve forgotten the name of the book unfortunately, because I’ve had to take it back to the library! I’ll check it out and include it here later.)

I hadn’t realised the simple fact that Google doesn’t go searching for something on the Net every time you request a search; it has already copied every item it’s spidered onto its own system, and indexed it and ranked it and done a host of other things to it. Your search then just searches Google itself. But Google doesn’t just give you a bunch of results; it takes your request and works out more about it than you can imagine. How it does this in the twinkling of an eye, I have no idea – but then I’ve never been able to work out how a computer saves a heap of information in a micro-second either. I’ve always had this theory that computers don’t actually save anything, they just pretend they do, and hope that they won’t ever get caught out!

Anyway, all that aside, I’ve just been reading an interesting piece on a blog which talks about how Google is dealing the best way to increase link popularity. Being not as technically-minded in the computer department as I’d like to be, I don’t understand it all, but boiled down it’s saying that in order to push you to the top of the search results, Google looks for now are links pointing to your website from many different sources on the internet. He goes on to say: "Page Rank is still a factor in that scenario, but there is a lot to be said about receiving 1000 links from different websites as opposed to receiving 100 links from different websites with a good Page Rank. Nobody can tell you the exact difference in the quality of one over the other but in our experience 1000 links from different websites with low levels of Page Rank work better in increasing your rankings within the organic results of Google."

I’m not sure who the writer of this particular piece, but it’s well worth reading, and comes from a site called US Web. Part of his follow-up to the info about having lots of links to a site, is to make greater use of blogs, and certainly there’s an increasing understanding that blogs can be far more than just your run-of-the-mill info machine, or john doe’s woes and misfortunes online. They’ve always been a place where links were in abundance, but in this new approach, it’s links with a purpose. Go, Link Popularity!